Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
Date: August 18, 2009 10:13:26 PM EDT
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the  
Bomb?

August 16, 2009
Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all 
>
Is Iran going to build a bomb?

Many people wonder, but Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims to have the  
answer.

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game  
theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at  
the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for  
his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to  
stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate  
decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For  
29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer  
model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can  
be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the  
early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a  
thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found  
that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as  
often as its own analysts did.

Last year, Bueno de Mesquita decided to forecast whether Iran would  
build a nuclear bomb. With the help of his undergraduate class at  
N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the  
country — anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had  
the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had  
an answer in a few minutes.

In June, I visited Bueno de Mesquita at his San Francisco home to see  
the results. A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita,  
who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso.  
Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop — so old that the  
lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off — and showed me a  
spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.

The spreadsheet included almost 90 players. Some were people, like the  
Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali  
Khamenei; others were groups, like the U.N. Security Council and  
Iran’s “religious radicals.” Next to each player, a number represented  
one variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model: the extent to which a  
player wanted Iran to have the ability to make nuclear weapons. The  
scale went from 0 to 200, with 0 being “no nuclear capacity at all”  
and 200 representing a test of a nuclear missile.

At the beginning of the simulation, the positions were what you would  
expect. The United States and Israel and most of Europe wanted Iran to  
have virtually no nuclear capacity, so their preferred outcomes were  
close to zero. In contrast, the Iranian hard-liners were aggressive.  
“This is not only ‘Build a bomb,’ ” Bueno de Mesquita said,  
characterizing their position. “It’s probably: ‘We should test a  
bomb.’ ”

But as the computer model ran forward in time, through 2009 and into  
2010, positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security  
players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some  
civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the  
religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present  
day, their power — another variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model —  
sagged significantly.

Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, there’s one called  
Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most  
likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 — bomb-making  
territory — but by next year settles at 118, where it doesn’t move  
much. “That’s the outcome,” Bueno de Mesquita said confidently,  
tapping the screen.

What does 118 mean? It means that Iran won’t make a nuclear bomb. By  
early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of  
developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this  
computer model is right, all the dire portents we’ve seen in recent  
months — the brutal crackdown on protesters, the dubious confessions,  
Khamenei’s accusations of American subterfuge — are masking a tectonic  
shift. The moderates are winning, even if we cannot see that yet.

[snip]RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>




-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com